Climate change deniers, listen up: your end is nigh

Bring it in tight. Those of us who are climate change deniers need to be singing from the same hymn sheet. For it is, of course, more urgent than ever now that science is crowding in on us, now the climate is changing before the people's very eyes, and our denials are exposed as progressively more ludicrous.

So, if pressed, I think we may have to concede that while climate change doesn't cause extreme weather events such as the storm that just hit South Australia, it does exacerbate them. I can't see a way around it, as the simply undeniable increased humidity and temperature incontrovertibly ramps up the volume of the wind and rain and the energy released by the storms.

We may even have to concede, if truly pressed, that Premier Jay Weatherill is on the right track in taking the lead – by focusing more on renewable energy sources – in weaning his state from the very fossil fuel generators that have been causing those extreme weather events and the subsequent damage.

But here's the key, that we can't give way on. When the storm from hell takes out the state's generators, renewable and fossil, we must all sneer together and say it's all Premier Weatherill's fault! Got it? Great. Write letters. Hit talkback. We can still hold the line! Ignore damage to future generations. Remember, it is all about whether or not the lights went off on Wednesday!

Game over for plebiscite

Great news this week, according to Newspoll in The Australian, that support for the plebiscite has fallen from 70 per cent earlier this year to now just 39 per cent. Meantime, 48 per cent of respondents want a simple vote by members of Parliament to get the job done, and while 29 per cent are still against same-sex marriage, 62 per cent are for it.

Get it? Those results say game over. This debate has been going on all year, and the longer it goes, the more ridiculous the position of the likes of Cory Bernardi and George Christensen is.

The more people look at it, the more they realise what an absurd, damaging and wasteful nonsense it is to go through the glorified and enormously expensive opinion poll that a non-binding plebiscite would be, when the whole thing can be knocked over by precisely the people we have elected to knock such things over.

Those figures vindicate the ALP leadership and leave the Coalition with one way out – change your policy, or get spanked for your trouble at the next election. There's no doubt what Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wants, to do – get it done in Parliament – but Bernardi and Christensen need to promise not to wreck the joint if he does!

Turnbull plays favourites

On the subject of the Prime Minister, he came briefly to Sydney University on Friday afternoon, to make a quite witty speech honouring John Howard, who had – entirely unruffled by the protest going on outside the Great Hall, over his stewardship of Australia's involvement in the Iraq War, an example of our country's admirably robust democracy in action – just received an honorary doctorate from the Uni. In his speech Turnbull noted Howard as "my favourite former prime minister." Hardly surprising, when you think on it!